The Guéniot Affair: A Right to Know or a Right to Smear? A CICNS Counter-Investigation

Gérard Guéniot, a doctor who had belonged to the Grail Movement until 1996, was prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter and for failing to assist a person in danger after the death of a young cancer patient he had met twice. He was tried on appeal in Douai and entirely cleared. This CICNS counter-investigation sets what the public was told against what the courts established. On one side, TF1’s programme “Le Droit de savoir” (“The Right to Know”) and the 284-page book that Antoine Guélaud, the channel’s deputy editorial director, drew from it, which the report says rehearses the case for the prosecution and nothing else. On the other, the 80-page document produced by the judicial investigation. The press went on smearing Guéniot after the verdict, and the report asks what that says about the rigour and the ethics of French reporting on “cults”.

CICNS report. (English translation of the report published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 14 November 2009. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Voice] (excerpt from a television broadcast): A doctor who is a member of a cult is being tried on appeal in Douai for having prescribed a three-week fast to a young follower suffering from cancer. The young woman, of course, did not survive.

[Voice]: She was swindled. The problem is that it is a swindle unto death.

[Voice]: [inaudible ?]

[Voice] (excerpt from a television broadcast): Doctor Guéniot, placed under formal investigation for involuntary manslaughter and failure to assist a person in danger. In 1995, this doctor took part in the care of Evelyne, 29 years old.

[Interviewer]: The story retraced by these excerpts is the best-known version of the affair. It is taken up again today, with a few variations, in the 284 pages of a book that seems destined for a certain success, and whose author, deputy editorial director of TF1, claims in a way to render justice in Evelyne’s name. The problem is that justice itself entirely cleared Doctor Guéniot at the end of the trial. Gérard Guéniot has since died, and only Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette’s magazine Ouverture had taken the trouble to meet him after the verdict. He said: “I feel no hatred, but it is true that this wrecked my life. I lost my entire practice, I lost friends, my family is suffering enormously from it, I have friends who walked away, and financially, I have paid dearly for all of this.”

[Voice]: And at present, even though the case has been tried, decided, and he has been cleared by the courts, the press keeps on smearing him. When you understand what happened, you tell yourself there is a very serious problem in terms of the rigour of reporting and of journalistic ethics.

[Participant] (journalist interviewing Dr Guéniot): What is your reaction today? Are you surprised, or what is your state of mind today?

[Guéniot]: Happy, satisfied, in a way, of course, with this result, which was unhoped-for, though not unexpected, because I am after all innocent and I know it — I have been proclaiming it for 13 years. But unhoped-for, because all the obstacles to this discovery of the truth over 13 years showed me that there was, all the same, a relentless campaign against me.

At the time, until 1996, I was part of an association, a spiritual movement (a religious movement, in fact) called the Grail Movement, which is the very basis of the accusations against me.

[Voice] (recap of the accusations): He believes in God, he is a guru, and so he has a droit de cuissage (a lord’s sexual entitlement) and a right of influence over others, particularly his patients. And since he is a doctor, he takes advantage of his practice to recruit for the cult.

[Guéniot]: The assertions that had been put forward (by the police, by the prosecutors, by the ADFI, and of course by the media) all referred back to the same scenario worked out 13 years ago by the ADFI, and never tried to conduct a genuine investigation.

[Interviewer]: In the end, the investigation was carried out by the courts. Over the course of this 80-page document, it emerges that Doctor Guéniot was accused of involuntary manslaughter and of failure to assist a person in danger over the death of a patient he met only twice, while nothing shows that he followed her case closely or from afar. The first meeting was a consultation, more than two years before her death, and the second at a lecture, in a very incidental way. The testimony of Evelyne, of her partner and of Doctor Guéniot about the consultation converges on several points.

First point: the doctor made no significant prescription, did not consider it useful to take Evelyne on as a patient, and referred her back to his colleague, Saint-Omer, who was already treating her. Second point: Evelyne expressed her refusal of chemotherapy very strongly, and that is what led Gérard Guéniot not to take her on as a patient. Third point: Evelyne told Doctor Guéniot of Saint-Omer’s intention to send her to an oncologist with a view to chemotherapy. So referring Evelyne back to Saint-Omer did not signify a wish to keep her away from conventional treatments either.

That leaves the “guru doctor” theory, according to which Doctor Guéniot is supposed to have influenced his colleague and remotely directed care and absences of care. This is the theory underlying the ADFI’s complaint. The Douai court establishes (let us quote) that Evelyne Marsaleix would express herself, in writing or orally, in a manner that would evolve according to the chronology of the investigation, in parallel with that of her cancer, and according to the period and the interlocutor, especially as regards the role she would attribute to Gérard Guéniot. Moreover, the court dismissed all of UNADFI’s claims, since it had not been possible to establish the existence of any significant influence by Doctor Guéniot over the people involved, including Evelyne, who in reality sometimes admitted that she had not really taken Doctor Guéniot’s theories seriously. Neither the doctor’s, nor, for that matter, those of the Grail Movement.

Let us return to our introduction.

[Voice] (the introductory excerpt again): A doctor, a member of a cult, is being tried on appeal in Douai for having prescribed a three-week fast to a young follower suffering from cancer. The young woman, of course, did not survive.

[Interviewer]: The prescription of a fast was never part of the accusations against Gérard Guéniot. Evelyne was never a follower of the Grail and did not, strictly speaking, succumb to her fast, since she died only a year later. You have to go to Eurochannel to find witnesses for the defence, in a report from September 2008.

[Voice] (Eurochannel report): I have a committee of patients which came together [inaudible ?], of 600 patients which came together to say that never had they heard talk of anything whatsoever, of a cult or of a religious movement.

[Participant] (defence witness, patient of Dr Guéniot): For me, Doctor Guéniot is an excellent doctor, and I fully intend to keep coming to consult him.

[Participant] (defence witness): This trial is pathetic. It is not possible to carry on like this for years. They have not realised the stupidity of it.

[Interviewer]: The point here is not to promote one opinion over another, but to underline the anti-cult bias, and above all that of the media, who ignored these testimonies and continue to ignore them after Gérard Guéniot was cleared by the courts.

[Voice]: Here we have the book that was produced, written by the journalist Antoine Guélaud, who was the one who had made the two “Le Droit de Savoir” programmes on TF1 on this subject: “Ils ne m’ont pas sauvé la vie” (“They did not save my life”). After developing, over more than 280 pages, the theses of the prosecution alone, and I am going to tell you in what form, because there, in my view, journalistically, there is a real problem. Here is what he says: “I was not dreaming. I would not like the facetiousness, or the cruelty, as the case may be, of pointing out the approximations, the errors of a justice that is superior to everything, even to the truth.” And in what form? And there too, I find that, for me, it is unacceptable. It is that he puts himself in the patient’s skin. That is to say, the whole book is written in the first person singular: “I”, “me”, “Evelyne”, “I did this, I did that, I felt”. So, each time, he describes what happened. He describes what happened with this or that person, supposedly through the eyes of this young woman, but it is with his own eyes, and each time, breathing into the characters (in the replies, in the dialogues, for example) breathing in the whole anti-cult mindset.

[Interviewer]: And the message comes across very well, using all the tricks of the genre, carried by Evelyne’s beautiful smile, the excerpts from a private diary that never existed, and a chapter given to the daughter of the deceased, who seems to have begun to drift away from the intimacy [inaudible ?]. He [inaudible]